Letters to the Editor
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Dana Runs, I think you should have a space in Salon.
A paid space.
And yes, you do write well and even better than your word-workery is your bravery. Alas, you might not be famous enough. And Mr. Aravosis is prickly enough and calcified enough to generate contentious copy and contentious copy garners attention and attention sells ad space. But, Ms. Runs, you're more than good enough. And funny enough too.
Your devoted fan,
The Capote Who Doesn't Golightly when it Comes to Equality
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Aravosis speaks for the reactionary minority
John Aravosis wrote:
"It is simply not p.c. in the gay community to question how and why the T got added on to the LGB, let alone ask what I as a gay man have in common with a man who wants to cut off his penis, surgically construct a vagina, and become a woman. I'm not passing judgment, I respect transgendered people and sympathize with their cause.
This petulant complaint demonstrates that Aravosis has no respect whatsoever for trans people. By describing transwomen as men who want to mutilate themselves, Aravosis betrays his adamant refusal to accept the validity of gender identities outside his own narrow experience. His claim to respect and sympathize with trans people is contradicted by his own bigotted words.
Aravosis does not represent the mainstream LGBT community, he represents straight-laced assimilated Democratic Party operatives like himself, Barney Frank, and Joe Solmonese of the Human Rights Campaign. This episode represents yet another example of how beltway Democrats have BETRAYED US.
Now that Salon has provided the reactionary HRC wing of the LGBT movement with a forum to promote their case, when will we see equal time offered to the overwhelming majority of LGBT organizations who immediately voiced their opposition to the Congressional Democrats' gutting of ENDA?
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John, your argument still doesn't hold up
John Aravosis says:
"The topic of discussion is whether the transgender community has the right to, along with elite gay activists, kill gay rights progress for the next twenty years because their movement is years behind ours. You took ENDA hostage, and now are playing the bereaved party. I'm sorry, but you don't have the right to claim the moral high ground when your bill wasn't go to pass and ours was until you demanded that we get no rights until you can get yours. 25m gays and lesbians were to be protected by that legislation. But you'd rather have no one be protected if you can't be protected (yet). Again, now who has dirty hands?"
John, this is patently false and you know it. The ENDA without trans language is NOT going to pass and yet you continually state that it will. Are you using Dick Cheney's math? It will pass the House, but the Senate isn't likely. Do you really think Mitch McConnell is going to let this have a simple up or down vote? Even if he does, where are you finding the votes? Is your former boss, Senator Ted Stevens, going to come over from the Dark Side to support this? I just don't see it, not from this Senate.
But for arguments sake, lets say it does pass both houses, then what? Bush vetos the damn thing in a huge Rose Garden Presentation and those 25 million gays and lesbians still don't have anything. And if you think he won't then you are delusional.
1. So again, why is it important to jettison the trans language now when you still aren't going to get a law?
2. You say that it will be decades till a trans inclusive ENDA is passed. Why? All of the Democratic candidates for President have all said that they support an inclusive ENDA. Odds are, one of them will be the next President. Couple that with expected Democratic gains in both Houses and it would seem to me that your decades turns into two years.
3. Finally, the people who are fighting ENDA, with or without trans language, could really care less about whose on the list, it's all the same to them. Read the action email sent out by Tony Perkins, he makes no disintcion and hates us all equally:
"If this legislation passes, it will mainstream homosexuality and transgenderism and provide "homosexual" activists a legal tool for punishing employers who do not approve of this lifestyle."
It doesn't matter to the opponents of this bill who is included. They are still going to fight it just as hard and just as viciously. The same cowards in the House and Senate that were afraid because of the T will still be as scared because of the GL and B. Nothing changes with this Congress so lets work hard between now and next November to get a better congress and a better President and them move with a fully inclusive ENDA.
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What did I get wrong?
What did I get wrong, Lish? I'm sorry if not using buzz words and code words that people don't understand, like gender identity, offends you, but I think I gave a pretty accurate definition of pre-op transsexual, did I not? This is exactly what I'm talking about. I can't even define in honest, frank, open terms what a pre-op transsexual (a member of the transgender community) is without people declaring war. Yet, you expect gay men and lesbians to say that you are their brothers and sisters, and just like them, so long as we don't actually discuss the details of who we are so that we can compare if in fact we are the same. Are you suggesting that transsexuals aren't members of the transgender community? Or that, once again, no one is permitted to talk about these issues, except you?
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Answering your own question
Anonymous writes,
"And yet I'm still waiting for someone to offer a reasonable explanation for why gay people and transgender people should be considered part of the same group. Sure, we're both discriminated against, but so are African Americans and Muslims and a host of other people. Why not add all of them to the acronym?
Those who don't question the connection between gay people and transgender people are simply falling for the common misconception that a man who has sex with men is more like a woman than a straight man. Once you buy into that, it's not much of a leap to assume that gay and transgender people are pretty much the same phenomenon. You're reinforcing the old stereotype that gay=feminine and straight=masculine."
*****
Okay. Although, in fact, several letters have provided the reasonable explanation you claim is so elusive, it doesn't matter - you've answered your own question. It's right there - it is a "common misconception," emphasis on COMMON, that "a man who has sex with men is more like a woman than a straight man." That very common misconception is the reason that gay people are discriminated against. For a man to act in a way that is commonly associated with women - to have sex with another man - goes against what anti-gay people perceive to be the natural order of things, and it threatens them for a man to have sex with a man, BECAUSE they (mis)perceive that gay men are more like a women than like straight men. And it freaks them out that a man might be acting like a woman. No matter how much you protest that you and your boyfriend are more like straight men than like women (and good for you, I'm so relieved), you yourself admit that many people think of things this way. And that fear, the fear that arises out of the perception of gay men or lesbians crossing gender lines, the fear that provokes people like the killers of Matthew Shepard, is the same fear that makes people upset that there might be transgender people in the world, the same fear that provoked the killers of Brandon Teena. We are all oppressed for the same reason - the very "common misperception" you are so incensed about. When that common fear causes employment discrimination, all of us should have a remedy, not just those of us who are more numerous.
Arguing otherwise exhibits a kind of falsely-divided thinking similar to the thinking that plagues a lot of straight people on the issue of marriage. "I don't have anything against gay people," they say. "I just think that they and their relationships are different from us and our relationships, so their relationships shouldn't be called marriage." But gay and lesbian unions do deserve to be called marriage, because fundamentally they are the same kind of relationship - it's a kind of privilege or fear-based blindness that prevents some straight people from being able to accept that idea. And transgender people do deserve to be included in the community we fight to protect, because fundamentally they suffer for the same reason we do. I think it's fair for people who haven't thought about it much before not to understand this immediately, but ultimately, it's the truth. And that truth is evident even in the way you phrased your demand for a reasonable explanation.